Three brokerage firms sued theflyonthewall.com in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the Web site misappropriated and infringed on the copyrights of their proprietary equity research reports. In their copyright lawsuit, the brokerage units of Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. claims the New Jersey-based Web site has republished their "confidential, time-sensitive equity research" verbatim often within minutes of its release to clients, citing more than a dozen reports from February 2005 as examples.